Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://rpf.io/ytsub Help us reach a wider audience by translating our video content: http://rpf.io/yttranslate Buy a Raspberry Pi from one of our Approved Resellers: http://rpf.io/ytproducts Find out more about the Raspberry Pi Foundation: Raspberry Pi http://rpf.io/ytrpi Code Club UK http://rpf.io/ytccuk Code Club International http://rpf.io/ytcci CoderDojo http://rpf.io/ytcd Check out our free online training courses: http://rpf.io/ytfl Find your local Raspberry Jam event: http://rpf.io/ytjam Work through our free online projects: http://rpf.io/ytprojects Do you have a question about your Raspberry Pi?

Flight status

We had a total of 212 Mission Space Lab entries from 22 countries. Of these, a 114 fantastic projects have been given flight status, and the teams’ project code will run in space!

But they’re not winners yet. In April, the code will be sent to the ISS, and then the teams will receive back their experimental data. Next, to get deeper insight into the process of scientific endeavour, they will need produce a final report analysing their findings. Winners will be chosen based on the merit of their final report, and the winning teams will get exclusive prizes. Check the list below to see if your team got flight status.

This column is from The MagPi issue 59. You can download a PDF of the full issue for free, or subscribe to receive the print edition through your letterbox or the digital edition on your tablet. All proceeds from the print and digital editions help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve our charitable goals.

“Hey, world!” Estefannie exclaims, a wide grin across her face as the camera begins to roll for another YouTube tutorial video. With a growing number of followers and wonderful support from her fans, Estefannie is building a solid reputation as an online maker, creating unique, fun content accessible to all.

It’s as if she was born into performing and making for an audience, but this fun, enjoyable journey to social media stardom came not from a desire to be in front of the camera, but rather as a unique approach to her own learning. While studying, Estefannie decided the best way to confirm her knowledge of a subject was to create an educational video explaining it. If she could teach a topic successfully, she knew she’d retained the information. And so her YouTube channel, Estefannie Explains It All, came into being.

Her first videos featured pages of notes with voice-over explanations of data structure and algorithm analysis. Then she moved in front of the camera, and expanded her skills in the process.

But YouTube isn’t her only outlet. With nearly 50000 followers, Estefannie’s Instagram game is strong, adding to an increasing number of female coders taking to the platform. Across her Instagram grid, you’ll find insights into her daily routine, from programming on location for work to behind-the-scenes troubleshooting as she begins to create another tutorial video. It’s hard work, with content creation for both Instagram and YouTube forever on her mind as she continues to work and progress successfully as a software engineer.

As a thank you to her Instagram fans for helping her reach 10000 followers, Estefannie created a free game for Android and iOS called Gravitris — imagine Tetris with balance issues!

Estefannie was born and raised in Mexico, with ambitions to become a graphic designer and animator. However, a documentary on coding at Pixar, and the beauty of Merida’s hair in Brave, opened her mind to the opportunities of software engineering in animation. She altered her career path, moved to the United States, and switched to a Computer Science course.

With a constant desire to make and to learn, Estefannie combines her software engineering profession with her hobby to create fun, exciting content for YouTube.

While studying, Estefannie started a Computer Science Girls Club at the University of Houston, Texas, and she found herself eager to put more time and effort into the movement to increase the percentage of women in the industry. The club was a success, and still is to this day. While Estefannie has handed over the reins, she’s still very involved in the cause.

Through her YouTube videos, Estefannie continues the theme of inclusion, with every project offering a warm sense of approachability for all, regardless of age, gender, or skill. From exploring Scratch and Makey Makey with her young niece and nephew to creating her own Disney ‘Made with Magic’ backpack for a trip to Disney World, Florida, Estefannie’s videos are essentially a documentary of her own learning process, produced so viewers can learn with her — and learn from her mistakes — to create their own tech wonders.

Estefannie’s automated gingerbread house project was a labour of love, with electronics, wires, and candy strewn across both her living room and kitchen for weeks before completion. While she already was a skilled programmer, the world of physical digital making was still fairly new for Estefannie. Having ditched her hot glue gun in favour of a soldering iron in a previous video, she continued to experiment and try out new, interesting techniques that are now second nature to many members of the maker community. With the gingerbread house, Estefannie was able to research and apply techniques such as light controls, servos, and app making, although the latter was already firmly within her skill set. The result? A fun video of ups and downs that resulted in a wonderful, festive treat. She even gave her holiday home its own solar panel!

And that’s just the beginning of her adventures with Pi…but we won’t spoil her future plans by telling you what’s coming next. Sorry! However, since this article was written last year, Estefannie has released a few more Pi-based project videos, plus some awesome interviews and live-streams with other members of the maker community such as Simone Giertz. She even made us an awesome video for our Raspberry Pi YouTube channel! So be sure to check out her latest releases.

2,264 Likes, 56 Comments – Estefannie Explains It All (@estefanniegg) on Instagram: “Best day yet!! I got to hangout, play Jenga with a huge arm robot, and have afternoon tea with…”

While many wonderful maker videos show off a project without much explanation, or expect a certain level of skill from viewers hoping to recreate the project, Estefannie’s videos exist almost within their own category. We can’t wait to see where Estefannie Explains It All goes next!

Unfortunately, it seems to have devolved into mostly a get-rich-quick scheme for nerds, and by nearly any measure it’s turning into a spectacular catastrophe. Its “success” is measured in how much a bitcoin is worth in US dollars, which is pretty close to an admission from its own investors that its only value is in converting back to “real” money — all while that same “success” is making it less useful as a distinct currency.

Blah, blah, everyone already knows this.

What concerns me slightly more is the gold rush hype cycle, which is putting cryptocurrency and “blockchain” in the news and lending it all legitimacy. People have raked in millions of dollars on ICOs of novel coins I’ve never heard mentioned again. (Note: again, that value is measured in dollars.) Most likely, none of the investors will see any return whatsoever on that money. They can’t, really, unless a coin actually takes off as a currency, and that seems at odds with speculative investing since everyone either wants to hoard or ditch their coins. When the coins have no value themselves, the money can only come from other investors, and eventually the hype winds down and you run out of other investors.

I fear this will hurt a lot of people before it’s over, so I’d like for it to be over as soon as possible.

That said, the hype itself has gotten way out of hand too. First it was the obsession with “blockchain” like it’s a revolutionary technology, but hey, Git is a fucking blockchain. The novel part is the way it handles distributed consensus (which in Git is basically left for you to figure out), and that’s uniquely important to currency because you want to be pretty sure that money doesn’t get duplicated or lost when moved around.

But now we have startups trying to use blockchains for website backends and file storage and who knows what else? Why? What advantage does this have? When you say “blockchain”, I hear “single Git repository” — so when you say “email on the blockchain”, I have an aneurysm.

Bitcoin seems to have sparked imagination in large part because it’s decentralized, but I’d argue it’s actually a pretty bad example of a decentralized network, since people keep forking it. The ability to fork is a feature, sure, but the trouble here is that the Bitcoin family has no notion of federation — there is one canonical Bitcoin ledger and it has no notion of communication with any other. That’s what you want for currency, not necessarily other applications. (Bitcoin also incentivizesfrivolous forking by giving the creator an initial pile of coins to keep and sell.)

And federation is much more interesting than decentralization! Federation gives us email and the web. Federation means I can set up my own instance with my own rules and still be able to meaningfully communicate with the rest of the network. Federation has some amount of tolerance for changes to the protocol, so such changes are more flexible and rely more heavily on consensus.

Federation is fantastic, and it feels like a massive tragedy that this rekindled interest in decentralization is mostly focused on peer-to-peer networks, which do little to address our current problems with centralized platforms.

Again, the tech is cool and all, but the marketing hype is getting way out of hand.

Maybe what I really want from 2018 is less marketing?

For one, I’ve seen a huge uptick in uncritically referring to any software that creates or classifies creative work as “AI”. Can we… can we not. It’s not AI. Yes, yes, nerds, I don’t care about the hair-splitting about the nature of intelligence — you know that when we hear “AI” we think of a human-like self-aware intelligence. But we’re applying it to stuff like a weird dog generator. Or to whatever neural network a website threw into production this week.

And this is dangerously misleading — we already had massive tech companies scapegoating The Algorithm™ for the poor behavior of their software, and now we’re talking about those algorithms as though they were self-aware, untouchable, untameable, unknowable entities of pure chaos whose decisions we are arbitrarily bound to. Ancient, powerful gods who exist just outside human comprehension or law.

It’s weird to see this stuff appear in consumer products so quickly, too. It feels quick, anyway. The latest iPhone can unlock via facial recognition, right? I’m sure a lot of effort was put into ensuring that the same person’s face would always be recognized… but how confident are we that other faces won’t be recognized? I admit I don’t follow all this super closely, so I may be imagining a non-problem, but I do know that humans are remarkably bad at checking for negative cases.

Hell, take the recurring problem of major platforms like Twitter and YouTube classifying anything mentioning “bisexual” as pornographic — because the word is also used as a porn genre, and someone threw a list of porn terms into a filter without thinking too hard about it. That’s just a word list, a fairly simple thing that any human can review; but suddenly we’re confident in opaque networks of inferred details?

I don’t know. “Traditional” classification and generation are much more comforting, since they’re a set of fairly abstract rules that can be examined and followed. Machine learning, as I understand it, is less about rules and much more about pattern-matching; it’s built out of the fingerprints of the stuff it’s trained on. Surely that’s just begging for tons of edge cases. They’re practically made of edge cases.

I’m reminded of a point I saw made a few days ago on Twitter, something I’d never thought about but should have. TurnItIn is a service for universities that checks whether students’ papers match any others, in order to detect cheating. But this is a paid service, one that fundamentally hinges on its corpus: a large collection of existing student papers. So students pay money to attend school, where they’re required to let their work be given to a third-party company, which then profits off of it? What kind of a goofy business model is this?

And my thoughts turn to machine learning, which is fundamentally different from an algorithm you can simply copy from a paper, because it’s all about the training data. And to get good results, you need a lot of training data. Where is that all coming from? How many for-profit companies are setting a neural network loose on the web — on millions of people’s work — and then turning around and selling the result as a product?

This is really a question of how intellectual property works in the internet era, and it continues our proud decades-long tradition of just kinda doing whatever we want without thinking about it too much. Nothing if not consistent.

A bit tougher, since computers are pretty alright now and everything continues to chug along. Maybe we should just quit while we’re ahead. There’s some real pie-in-the-sky stuff that would be nice, but it certainly won’t happen within a year, and may never happen except in some horrific Algorithmic™ form designed by people that don’t know anything about the problem space and only works 60% of the time but is treated as though it were bulletproof.

The giants are getting more giant. Maybe too giant? Granted, it could be much worse than Google and Amazon — it could be Apple!

Amazon has its own delivery service and brick-and-mortar stores now, as well as providing the plumbing for vast amounts of the web. They’re not doing anything particularly outrageous, but they kind of loom.

Ad company Google just put ad blocking in its majority-share browser — albeit for the ambiguously-noble goal of only blocking obnoxious ads so that people will be less inclined to install a blanket ad blocker.

Twitter is kind of a nightmare but no one wants to leave. I keep trying to use Mastodon as well, but I always forget about it after a day, whoops.

Facebook sounds like a total nightmare but no one wants to leave that either, because normies don’t use anything else, which is itself direly concerning.

IRC is rapidly bleeding mindshare to Slack and Discord, both of which are far better at the things IRC sadly never tried to do and absolutely terrible at the exact things IRC excels at.

The problem is the same as ever: there’s no incentive to interoperate. There’s no fundamental technical reason why Twitter and Tumblr and MySpace and Facebook can’t intermingle their posts; they just don’t, because why would they bother? It’s extra work that makes it easier for people to not use your ecosystem.

I don’t know what can be done about that, except that hope for a really big player to decide to play nice out of the kindness of their heart. The really big federated success stories — say, the web — mostly won out because they came along first. At this point, how does a federated social network take over? I don’t know.

I… don’t really have a solid grasp on what’s happening in tech socially at the moment. I’ve drifted a bit away from the industry part, which is where that all tends to come up. I have the vague sense that things are improving, but that might just be because the Rust community is the one I hear the most about, and it puts a lot of effort into being inclusive and welcoming.

So… more projects should be like Rust? Do whatever Rust is doing? And not so much what Linus is doing.

I haven’t heard this brought up much lately, but it would still be nice to see. The Bay Area runs on open source and is raking in zillions of dollars on its back; pump some of that cash back into the ecosystem, somehow.

I’ve seen a couple open source projects on Patreon, which is fantastic, but feels like a very small solution given how much money is flowing through the commercial tech industry.

One might wonder where the money to host a website comes from, then? I don’t know. Maybe we should loop this in with the above thing and find a more informal way to pay people for the stuff they make when we find it useful, without the financial and cognitive overhead of A Transaction or Giving Someone My Damn Credit Card Number. You know, something like Bitco— ah, fuck.

Big things are afoot in the world of HackSpace magazine! This month we’re running our first special issue, with wearables projects throughout the magazine. Moreover, we’re giving away our first subscription gift free to all 12-month print subscribers. Lastly, and most importantly, we’ve made the cover EXTRA SHINY!

Prepare your eyeballs — it’s HackSpace magazine issue 4!

Wearables

In this issue, we’re taking an in-depth look at wearable tech. Not Fitbits or Apple Watches — we’re talking stuff you can make yourself, from projects that take a couple of hours to put together, to the huge, inspiring builds that are bringing technology to the runway. If you like wearing clothes and you like using your brain to make things better, then you’ll love this feature.

We’re continuing our obsession with Nixie tubes, with the brilliant Time-To-Go-Clock – Trump edition. This ingenious bit of kit uses obsolete Russian electronics to count down the time until the end of the 45th president’s term in office. However, you can also program it to tell the time left to any predictable event, such as the deadline for your tax return or essay submission, or the date England gets knocked out of the World Cup.

We’re also talking to Dr Lucy Rogers — NASA alumna, Robot Wars judge, and fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers — about the difference between making as a hobby and as a job, and about why we need the Guild of Makers. Plus, issue 4 has a teeny boat, the most beautiful Raspberry Pi cases you’ve ever seen, and it explores the results of what happens when you put a bunch of hardware hackers together in a French chateau — sacré bleu!

Tutorials

As always, we’ve got more how-tos than you can shake a soldering iron at. Fittingly for the current climate here in the UK, there’s a hot water monitor, which shows you how long you have before your morning shower turns cold, and an Internet of Tea project to summon a cuppa from your kettle via the web. Perhaps not so fittingly, there’s also an ESP8266 project for monitoring a solar power station online. Readers in the southern hemisphere, we’ll leave that one for you — we haven’t seen the sun here for months!

And there’s more!

We’re super happy to say that all our 12-month print subscribers have been sent an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express with this new issue:

This gadget was developed primarily with wearables in mind and comes with all sorts of in-built functionality, so subscribers can get cracking with their latest wearable project today! If you’re not a 12-month print subscriber, you’ll miss out, so subscribe here to get your magazine and your device, and let us know what you’ll make.

A scientist with a rather unusual name, Meow-Ludo Meow-Meow, gave a talk at
linux.conf.au 2018
about the current trends in “do it yourself” (DIY) biology or
“biohacking”. He is perhaps most famous for being
prosecuted for implanting an Opal card RFID chip into his hand; the
Opal card is used for public transportation fares in Sydney. He gave more
details about his implant as well as describing some other biohacking
projects in an engaging presentation.

Today I’m back with an update on the Pi Plug I made a while back. This prototype is still in the works, and is much more modular than the previous version. https://N-O-D-E.net/piplug2.html https://github.com/N-O-D-E/piplug —————- Shop: http://N-O-D-E.net/shop/ Patreon: http://patreon.com/N_O_D_E_ BTC: 17HqC7ZzmpE7E8Liuyb5WRbpwswBUgKRGZ Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/ceA-nL Music: https://archive.org/details/Fwawn-FromManToGod

The Pi Zero Power Case

In a video early last year, YouTuber N-O-D-E revealed his Pi Zero Power Case, an all-in-one always-on networked computer that fits snugly against a wall power socket.

The project uses an official Raspberry Pi power supply, a Zero4U USB hub, and a Raspberry Pi Zero W, and it allows completely wireless connection to a network. N-O-D-E cut the power cord and soldered its wires directly to the power input of the USB hub. The hub powers the Zero via pogo pins that connect directly to the test pads beneath.

The Power Case is a neat project, but it may be a little daunting for anyone not keen on cutting and soldering the power supply wires.

Pi Plug 2

In his overhaul of the design, N-O-D-E has created a modular reimagining of the previous always-on networked computer that fits more streamlined to the wall socket and requires absolutely no soldering or hacking of physical hardware.

The Pi Plug 2 uses a USB power supply alongside two custom PCBs and a Zero W. While one PCB houses a USB connector that slots directly into the power supply, two blobs of solder on the second PCB press against the test pads beneath the Zero W. When connected, the PCBs run power directly from the wall socket to the Raspberry Pi Zero W. Neat!

While N-O-D-E isn’t currently selling these PCBs in his online store, all files are available on GitHub, so have a look if you want to recreate the Pi Plug.

Besides simply SSH’ing into the Pi, you could also easily install a remote desktop client and use the GUI. You can share your computer’s internet connection with the Pi and use it just like you would normally, but now without the need for a monitor, chargers, adapters, cables, or peripherals.

We’re keen to see how our community is hacking their Zeros and Zero Ws in order to take full advantage of the small footprint of the computer, so be sure to share your projects and ideas with us, either in the comments below or via social media.

Use the Join button above to receive notification of new posts in this series.

In 2009, Google disclosed that they had 400 recruiters on staff working to hire nearly 10,000 people. Someday, that might be your challenge, but most companies in their early days are looking to hire a handful of people — the right people — each year. Assuming you are closer to startup stage than Google stage, let’s look at who you need to hire, when to hire them, where to find them (and how to help them find you), and how to get them to join your company.

Who Should Be Your First Hires

In later stage companies, the roles in the company have been well fleshed out, don’t change often, and each role can be segmented to focus on a specific area. A large company may have an entire department focused on just cubicle layout; at a smaller company you may not have a single person whose actual job encompasses all of facilities. At Backblaze, our CTO has a passion and knack for facilities and mostly led that charge. Also, the needs of a smaller company are quick to change. One of our first hires was a QA person, Sean, who ended up being 100% focused on data center infrastructure. In the early stage, things can shift quite a bit and you need people that are broadly capable, flexible, and most of all willing to pitch in where needed.

That said, there are times you may need an expert. At a previous company we hired Jon, a PhD in Bayesian statistics, because we needed algorithmic analysis for spam fighting. However, even that person was not only able and willing to do the math, but also code, and to not only focus on Bayesian statistics but explore a plethora of spam fighting options.

When To Hire

If you’ve raised a lot of cash and are willing to burn it with mistakes, you can guess at all the roles you might need and start hiring for them. No judgement: that’s a reasonable strategy if you’re cash-rich and time-poor.

If your cash is limited, try to see what you and your team are already doing and then hire people to take those jobs. It may sound counterintuitive, but if you’re already doing it presumably it needs to be done, you have a good sense of the type of skills required to do it, and you can bring someone on-board and get them up to speed quickly. That then frees you up to focus on tasks that can’t be done by someone else. At Backblaze, I ran marketing internally for years before hiring a VP of Marketing, making it easier for me to know what we needed. Once I was hiring, my primary goal was to find someone I could trust to take that role completely off of me so I could focus solely on my CEO duties

Where To Find the Right People

Finding great people is always difficult, particularly when the skillsets you’re looking for are highly in-demand by larger companies with lots of cash and cachet. You, however, have one massive advantage: you need to hire 5 people, not 5,000.

People You Worked With

The absolutely best people to hire are ones you’ve worked with before that you already know are good in a work situation. Consider your last job, the one before, and the one before that. A significant number of the people we recruited at Backblaze came from our previous startup MailFrontier. We knew what they could do and how they would fit into the culture, and they knew us and thus could quickly meld into the environment. If you didn’t have a previous job, consider people you went to school with or perhaps individuals with whom you’ve done projects previously.

People You Know

Hiring friends, family, and others can be risky, but should be considered. Sometimes a friend can be a “great buddy,” but is not able to do the job or isn’t a good fit for the organization. Having to let go of someone who is a friend or family member can be rough. Have the conversation up front with them about that possibility, so you have the ability to stay friends if the position doesn’t work out. Having said that, if you get along with someone as a friend, that’s one critical component of succeeding together at work. At Backblaze we’ve hired a number of people successfully that were friends of someone in the organization.

Friends Of People You Know

Your network is likely larger than you imagine. Your employees, investors, advisors, spouses, friends, and other folks all know people who might be a great fit for you. Make sure they know the roles you’re hiring for and ask them if they know anyone that would fit. Search LinkedIn for the titles you’re looking for and see who comes up; if they’re a 2nd degree connection, ask your connection for an introduction.

People You Know About

Sometimes the person you want isn’t someone anyone knows, but you may have read something they wrote, used a product they’ve built, or seen a video of a presentation they gave. Reach out. You may get a great hire: worst case, you’ll let them know they were appreciated, and make them aware of your organization.

Other Places to Find People

There are a million other places to find people, including job sites, community groups, Facebook/Twitter, GitHub, and more. Consider where the people you’re looking for are likely to congregate online and in person.

A Comment on Diversity

Hiring “People You Know” can often result in “Hiring People Like You” with the same workplace experiences, culture, background, and perceptions. Some studies have shown [1, 2, 3, 4] that homogeneous groups deliver faster, while heterogeneous groups are more creative. Also, “Hiring People Like You” often propagates the lack of women and minorities in tech and leadership positions in general. When looking for people you know, keep an eye to not discount people you know who don’t have the same cultural background as you.

Helping People To Find You

Reaching out proactively to people is the most direct way to find someone, but you want potential hires coming to you as well. To do this, they have to a) be aware of you, b) know you have a role they’re interested in, and c) think they would want to work there. Let’s tackle a) and b) first below.

Your Blog

I started writing our blog before we launched the product and talked about anything I found interesting related to our space. For several years now our team has owned the content on the blog and in 2017 over 1.5 million people read it. Each time we have a position open it’s published to the blog. If someone finds reading about backup and storage interesting, perhaps they’d want to dig in deeper from the inside. Many of the people we’ve recruited have mentioned reading the blog as either how they found us or as a factor in why they wanted to work here.[BTW, this is Gleb’s 200th post on Backblaze’s blog. The first was in 2008. — Editor]

Your Email List

In addition to the emails our blog subscribers receive, we send regular emails to our customers, partners, and prospects. These are largely focused on content we think is directly useful or interesting for them. However, once every few months we include a small mention that we’re hiring, and the positions we’re looking for. Often a small blurb is all you need to capture people’s imaginations whether they might find the jobs interesting or can think of someone that might fit the bill.

Your Social Involvement

Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, Hacker News or Slashdot, your potential hires are engaging in various communities. Being socially involved helps make people aware of you, reminds them of you when they’re considering a job, and paints a picture of what working with you and your company would be like. Adam was in a Reddit thread where we were discussing our Storage Pods, and that interaction was ultimately part of the reason he left Apple to come to Backblaze.

Convincing People To Join

Once you’ve found someone or they’ve found you, how do you convince them to join? They may be currently employed, have other offers, or have to relocate. Again, while the biggest companies have a number of advantages, you might have more unique advantages than you realize.

Why Should They Join You

Here are a set of items that you may be able to offer which larger organizations might not:

Role: Consider the strengths of the role. Perhaps it will have broader scope? More visibility at the executive level? No micromanagement? Ability to take risks? Option to create their own role?

Compensation: In addition to salary, will their options potentially be worth more since they’re getting in early? Can they trade-off salary for more options? Do they get option refreshes?

Benefits: In addition to healthcare, food, and 401(k) plans, are there unique benefits of your company? One company I knew took the entire team for a one-month working retreat abroad each year.

Location: Most people prefer to work close to home. If you’re located outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, you might be at a disadvantage for not being in the heart of tech. But if you find employees close to you you’ve got a huge advantage. Sometimes it’s micro; even in the Bay Area the difference of 5 miles can save 20 minutes each way every day. We located the Backblaze headquarters in San Mateo, a middle-ground that made it accessible to those coming from San Jose and San Francisco. We also chose a downtown location near a train, restaurants, and cafes: all to make it easier and more pleasant. Also, are you flexible in letting your employees work remotely? Our systems administrator Elliott is about to embark on a long-term cross-country journey working from an RV.

Environment: Open office, cubicle, cafe, work-from-home? Loud/quiet? Social or focused? 24×7 or work-life balance? Different environments appeal to different people.

Team: Who will they be working with? A company with 100,000 people might have 100 brilliant ones you’d want to work with, but ultimately we work with our core team. Who will your prospective hires be working with?

Market: Some people are passionate about gaming, others biotech, still others food. The market you’re targeting will get different people excited.

Product: Have an amazing product people love? Highlight that. If you’re lucky, your potential hire is already a fan.

Mission: Curing cancer, making people happy, and other company missions inspire people to strive to be part of the journey. Our mission is to make storing data astonishingly easy and low-cost. If you care about data, information, knowledge, and progress, our mission helps drive all of them.

Culture: I left this for last, but believe it’s the most important. What is the culture of your company? Finding people who want to work in the culture of your organization is critical. If they like the culture, they’ll fit and continue it. We’ve worked hard to build a culture that’s collaborative, friendly, supportive, and open; one in which people like coming to work. For example, the five founders started with (and still have) the same compensation and equity. That started a culture of “we’re all in this together.” Build a culture that will attract the people you want, and convey what the culture is.

Writing The Job Description

Most job descriptions focus on the all the requirements the candidate must meet. While important to communicate, the job description should first sell the job. Why would the appropriate candidate want the job? Then share some of the requirements you think are critical. Remember that people read not just what you say but how you say it. Try to write in a way that conveys what it is like to actually be at the company. Ahin, our VP of Marketing, said the job description itself was one of the things that attracted him to the company.

Orchestrating Interviews

Much can be said about interviewing well. I’m just going to say this: make sure that everyone who is interviewing knows that their job is not only to evaluate the candidate, but give them a sense of the culture, and sell them on the company. At Backblaze, we often have one person interview core prospects solely for company/culture fit.

Onboarding

Hiring success shouldn’t be defined by finding and hiring the right person, but instead by the right person being successful and happy within the organization. Ensure someone (usually their manager) provides them guidance on what they should be concentrating on doing during their first day, first week, and thereafter. Giving new employees opportunities and guidance so that they can achieve early wins and feel socially integrated into the company does wonders for bringing people on board smoothly

In Closing

Our Director of Production Systems, Chris, said to me the other day that he looks for companies where he can work on “interesting problems with nice people.” I’m hoping you’ll find your own version of that and find this post useful in looking for your early and critical hires.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say, if you know of anyone looking for a place with “interesting problems with nice people,” Backblaze is hiring. 😉

See how we built it, including our materials, code, and supplemental instructions, on Hackster.io: https://www.hackster.io/hackerhouse/automated-indoor-gardener-a90907 With how busy our lives are, it’s sometimes easy to forget to pay a little attention to your thirsty indoor plants until it’s too late and you are left with a crusty pile of yellow carcasses.

Building an automated gardener

Tired of their plants looking a little too ‘crispy’, Hacker House have created an automated gardener using a Raspberry Pi Zero W alongside some 3D-printed parts, a 5v USB grow light, and a peristaltic pump.

They designed and 3D printed a PLA casing for the project, allowing enough space within for the Raspberry Pi Zero W, the pump, and the added electronics including soldered wiring and two N-channel power MOSFETs. The MOSFETs serve to switch the light and the pump on and off.

Due to the amount of power the light and pump need, the team replaced the Pi’s standard micro USB power supply with a 12v switching supply.

Raspberry Pi and your home garden

Raspberry Pis make great babysitters for your favourite plants, both inside and outside your home. Here at Pi Towers, we have Bert, our Slack- and Twitter-connected potted plant who reminds us when he’s thirsty and in need of water.

Cerberus Technologies, in their own words: Cerberus is a company founded in 2017 by a team of visionary iGaming veterans. Our mission is simple – to offer the best tech solutions through a data-driven and a customer-first approach, delivering innovative solutions that go against traditional forms of working and process. This mission is based on the solid foundations of reliability, flexibility and security, and we intend to fundamentally change the way iGaming and other industries interact with technology.

Over the years, I have developed and created a number of data warehouses from scratch. Recently, I built a data warehouse for the iGaming industry single-handedly. To do it, I used the power and flexibility of Amazon Redshift and the wider AWS data management ecosystem. In this post, I explain how I was able to build a robust and scalable data warehouse without the large team of experts typically needed.

In two of my recent projects, I ran into challenges when scaling our data warehouse using on-premises infrastructure. Data was growing at many tens of gigabytes per day, and query performance was suffering. Scaling required major capital investment for hardware and software licenses, and also significant operational costs for maintenance and technical staff to keep it running and performing well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the resources needed to scale the infrastructure with data growth, and these projects were abandoned. Thanks to cloud data warehousing, the bottleneck of infrastructure resources, capital expense, and operational costs have been significantly reduced or have totally gone away. There is no more excuse for allowing obstacles of the past to delay delivering timely insights to decision makers, no matter how much data you have.

With Amazon Redshift and AWS, I delivered a cloud data warehouse to the business very quickly, and with a small team: me. I didn’t have to order hardware or software, and I no longer needed to install, configure, tune, or keep up with patches and version updates. Instead, I easily set up a robust data processing pipeline and we were quickly ingesting and analyzing data. Now, my data warehouse team can be extremely lean, and focus more time on bringing in new data and delivering insights. In this post, I show you the AWS services and the architecture that I used.

Handling data feeds

I have several different data sources that provide everything needed to run the business. The data includes activity from our iGaming platform, social media posts, clickstream data, marketing and campaign performance, and customer support engagements.

To handle the diversity of data feeds, I developed abstract integration applications using Docker that run on Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) and feed data to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. These data streams can be used for real time analytics. In my system, each record in Kinesis is preprocessed by an AWS Lambda function to cleanse and aggregate information. My system then routes it to be stored where I need on Amazon S3 by Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Suppose that you used an on-premises architecture to accomplish the same task. A team of data engineers would be required to maintain and monitor a Kafka cluster, develop applications to stream data, and maintain a Hadoop cluster and the infrastructure underneath it for data storage. With my stream processing architecture, there are no servers to manage, no disk drives to replace, and no service monitoring to write.

Setting up a Kinesis stream can be done with a few clicks, and the same for Kinesis Firehose. Firehose can be configured to automatically consume data from a Kinesis Data Stream, and then write compressed data every N minutes to Amazon S3. When I want to process a Kinesis data stream, it’s very easy to set up a Lambda function to be executed on each message received. I can just set a trigger from the AWS Lambda Management Console, as shown following.

Regardless of the format I receive the data from our partners, I can send it to Kinesis as JSON data using my own formatters. After Firehose writes this to Amazon S3, I have everything in nearly the same structure I received but compressed, encrypted, and optimized for reading.

This data is automatically crawled by AWS Glue and placed into the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This means that I can immediately query the data directly on S3 using Amazon Athena or through Amazon Redshift Spectrum. Previously, I used Amazon EMR and an Amazon RDS–based metastore in Apache Hive for catalog management. Now I can avoid the complexity of maintaining Hive Metastore catalogs. Glue takes care of high availability and the operations side so that I know that end users can always be productive.

Working with Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift for analysis

I found Amazon Athena extremely useful out of the box for ad hoc analysis. Our engineers (me) use Athena to understand new datasets that we receive and to understand what transformations will be needed for long-term query efficiency.

For our data analysts and data scientists, we’ve selected Amazon Redshift. Amazon Redshift has proven to be the right tool for us over and over again. It easily processes 20+ million transactions per day, regardless of the footprint of the tables and the type of analytics required by the business. Latency is low and query performance expectations have been more than met. We use Redshift Spectrum for long-term data retention, which enables me to extend the analytic power of Amazon Redshift beyond local data to anything stored in S3, and without requiring me to load any data. Redshift Spectrum gives me the freedom to store data where I want, in the format I want, and have it available for processing when I need it.

To load data directly into Amazon Redshift, I use AWS Data Pipeline to orchestrate data workflows. I create Amazon EMR clusters on an intra-day basis, which I can easily adjust to run more or less frequently as needed throughout the day. EMR clusters are used together with Amazon RDS, Apache Spark 2.0, and S3 storage. The data pipeline application loads ETL configurations from Spring RESTful services hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The application then loads data from S3 into memory, aggregates and cleans the data, and then writes the final version of the data to Amazon Redshift. This data is then ready to use for analysis. Spark on EMR also helps with recommendations and personalization use cases for various business users, and I find this easy to set up and deliver what users want. Finally, business users use Amazon QuickSight for self-service BI to slice, dice, and visualize the data depending on their requirements.

Each AWS service in this architecture plays its part in saving precious time that’s crucial for delivery and getting different departments in the business on board. I found the services easy to set up and use, and all have proven to be highly reliable for our use as our production environments. When the architecture was in place, scaling out was either completely handled by the service, or a matter of a simple API call, and crucially doesn’t require me to change one line of code. Increasing shards for Kinesis can be done in a minute by editing a stream. Increasing capacity for Lambda functions can be accomplished by editing the megabytes allocated for processing, and concurrency is handled automatically. EMR cluster capacity can easily be increased by changing the master and slave node types in Data Pipeline, or by using Auto Scaling. Lastly, RDS and Amazon Redshift can be easily upgraded without any major tasks to be performed by our team (again, me).

In the end, using AWS services including Kinesis, Lambda, Data Pipeline, and Amazon Redshift allows me to keep my team lean and highly productive. I eliminated the cost and delays of capital infrastructure, as well as the late night and weekend calls for support. I can now give maximum value to the business while keeping operational costs down. My team pushed out an agile and highly responsive data warehouse solution in record time and we can handle changing business requirements rapidly, and quickly adapt to new data and new user requests.

About the Author

Stephen Borg is the Head of Big Data and BI at Cerberus Technologies. He has a background in platform software engineering, and first became involved in data warehousing using the typical RDBMS, SQL, ETL, and BI tools. He quickly became passionate about providing insight to help others optimize the business and add personalization to products. He is now the Head of Big Data and BI at Cerberus Technologies.

Keys? Where we’re going you don’t need keys!

This project, created by either Yolanda or Ken Fisher (or both!), uses an array of LEDs and photoresistors to form a MIDI sequencer. Twelve LEDs replace piano keys, and another three change octaves and access the menu.

Each LED is paired with a photoresistor, which detects the emitted light to form a closed circuit. Interrupting the light beam — in this case with a finger — breaks the circuit, telling the Python program to perform an action.

We’re all hoping this is just the scaled-down prototype of a full-sized LED grand piano

Using Pygame, the 2fishy team can access 75 different instruments and 128 notes per instrument, making their wooden piano more than just a one-hit wonder.

Piano building

The duo made the piano’s body out of plywood, hardboard, and dowels, and equipped it with a Raspberry Pi 2, a speaker, and the aforementioned LEDs and photoresistors.

A Raspberry Pi 2 and speaker sit within the wooden body, with LEDs and photoresistors in place of the keys.

A complete how-to for the build, including some rather fancy and informative schematics, is available at Instructables, where 2fishy received a bronze medal for their project. Congratulations!

Learn more

If you’d like to learn more about using Pygame, check out The MagPi’s Make Games with Python Essentials Guide, available both in print and as a free PDF download.

And for more music-based projects using a variety of tech, be sure to browse our free resources.

Full integration The complete tutorial can be found here: https://www.instructables.com/id/When-COZMO-the-Robot-Meets-the-Raspberry-Pi/

COZMO

COZMO is a Python-programmable robot from ANKI that boasts a variety of on-board sensors and a camera, and that can be controlled via an app or via code. To get an idea of how COZMO works, check out this rather excitable video from the wonderful Mayim Bialik.

The COZMO SDK

COZMO’s creators, ANKI, provide a Software Development Kit (SDK) so that users can get the most out of their COZMO. This added functionality is a great opportunity for budding coders to dive into hacking their toys, without the risk of warranty voiding/upsetting parents/not being sure how to put a toy back together again.

By the way, I should point out that this is in no way a sponsored blog post. I just think COZMO is ridiculously cute…because tiny robots are adorable, no matter their intentions.

Marcelo Rovai + Raspberry Pi + COZMO

For his Instructables tutorial, Marcelo connected an Android device running the COZMO app to his Raspberry Pi 3 via USB. Once USB debugging had been enabled on his device, he installed the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to the Raspberry Pi. Then his Pi was able to recognise the connected Android device, and from there, Marcelo moved on to installing the SDK, including support for COZMO’s camera.

The SDK comes with pre-installed examples, allowing users to try out the possibilities of the kit, such as controlling what COZMO says by editing a Python script.

Hello World The complete tutorial can be found here: https://www.instructables.com/id/When-COZMO-the-Robot-Meets-the-Raspberry-Pi/

Do more with COZMO

Marcelo’s tutorial offers more example code for users of the COZMO SDK, along with the code to run the LED button game featured in the video above, and tips on utilising the SDK to take full advantage of COZMO. Check it out here on Instructables, and visit his website for even more projects.

This column is from The MagPi issue 58. You can download a PDF of the full issue for free, or subscribe to receive the print edition through your letterbox or the digital edition on your tablet. All proceeds from the print and digital editions help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve our charitable goals.

Dr Lucy Rogers calls herself a Transformer. “I transform simple electronics into cool gadgets, I transform science into plain English, I transform problems into opportunities. I am also a catalyst. I am interested in everything around me, and can often see ways of putting two ideas from very different fields together into one package. If I cannot do this myself, I connect the people who can.”

Among many other projects, Dr Lucy Rogers currently focuses much of her attention on reducing the damage from space debris

It’s a pretty wide range of interests and skills for sure. But it only takes a brief look at Lucy’s résumé to realise that she means it. When she says she’s interested in everything around her, this interest reaches from electronics to engineering, wearable tech, space, robotics, and robotic dinosaurs. And she can be seen talking about all of these things across various companies’ social media, such as IBM, websites including the Women’s Engineering Society, and books, including her own.

With her bright LED boots, Lucy was one of the wonderful Pi community members invited to join us and HRH The Duke of York at St James’s Palace just over a year ago

When not attending conferences as guest speaker, tinkering with electronics, or creating engaging IoT tutorials, she can be found retrofitting Raspberry Pis into the aforementioned robotic dinosaurs at Blackgang Chine Land of Imagination, writing, and judging battling bots for the BBC’s Robot Wars.

First broadcast in the UK between 1998 and 2004, Robot Wars was revived in 2016 with a new look and new judges, including Dr Lucy Rogers. Competitors battle their home-brew robots, and Lucy, together with the other two judges, awards victories among the carnage of robotic remains

Lucy graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. After that, she spent seven years at Rolls-Royce Industrial Power Group as a graduate trainee before becoming a chartered engineer and earning her PhD in bubbles.

Bubbles?

“Foam formation in low‑expansion fire-fighting equipment. I investigated the equipment to determine how the bubbles were formed,” she explains. Obviously. Bubbles!

Lucy graduated from the Singularity University Graduate Studies Program in 2011, focusing on how robotics, nanotech, medicine, and various technologies can tackle the challenges facing the world

She then went on to become a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) in 2005 and, later, a fellow of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) and British Interplanetary Society. As a member of the Association of British Science Writers, Lucy wrote It’s ONLY Rocket Science: an Introduction in Plain English.

In It’s Only Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English Lucy explains that ‘hard to understand’ isn’t the same as ‘impossible to understand’, and takes her readers through the journey of building a rocket, leaving Earth, and travelling the cosmos

As a standout member of the industry, and all-round fun person to be around, Lucy has quickly established herself as a valued member of the Pi community.

In 2014, with the help of Neil Ford and Andy Stanford-Clark, Lucy worked with the UK’s oldest amusement park, Blackgang Chine Land of Imagination, on the Isle of Wight, with the aim of updating its animatronic dinosaurs. The original Blackgang Chine dinosaurs had a limited range of behaviour: able to roar, move their heads, and stomp a foot in a somewhat repetitive action.

Lucy, Neil Ford, and Andy Stanford-Clark used several Raspberry Pis and Node-RED to visualise flows of events when updating the robotic dinosaurs at Blackgang Chine. They went on to create the successful WightPi Raspberry Jam event, where visitors could join in with the unique hacking opportunity.

Given her love for tinkering with tech, and a love for stand-up comedy that can be uncovered via a quick YouTube search, it’s no wonder that Lucy was asked to help judge the first round of the ‘Make us laugh’ Pioneers challenge for Raspberry Pi. Alongside comedian Bec Hill, Code Club UK director Maria Quevedo, and the face of the first challenge, Owen Daughtery, Lucy lent her expertise to help name winners in the various categories of the teens event, and offered her support to future Pioneers.

Over the years video game developer Blizzard Entertainment has published many popular game titles, including World of Warcraft (WoW).

First released in 2004, the multiplayer online role-playing game has been a massive success. It holds the record for the most popular MMORPG in history, with over 100 million subscribers.

While the current game looks entirely different from its first release, there are many nostalgic gamers who still enjoy the earlier editions. Unfortunately, however, they can’t play them. At least not legally.

The only option WoW fans have is to go to unauthorized fan projects which recreate the early gaming experience, such as Light’s Hope.

“We are what’s known as a ‘Legacy Server’ project for World of Warcraft, which seeks to emulate the experience of playing the game in its earliest iterations, including advancing through early expansions,” the project explains.

“If you’ve ever wanted to see what World of Warcraft was like back in 2004 then this is the place to be. Our goal is to maintain the same feel and structure as the realms back then while maintaining an open platform for development and operation.”

In recent years the project has captured the hearts of tens of thousands of die-hard WoW fans. At the time of writing, the most popular realm has more than 6,000 people playing from all over the world. Blizzard, however, is less excited.

The company has asked the developer platform GitHub to remove the code repository published by Light’s Hope. Blizzard’s notice targets several SQL databases stating that the layout and structure is nearly identical to the early WoW databases.

“The LightsHope spell table has identical layout and typically identical field names as the table from early WoW. We use database tables to represent game data, like spells, in WoW,” Blizzard writes.

“In our code, we use .sql files to represent the data layout of each table […]. MaNGOS, the platform off of which Light’s Hope appears to be built, uses a similar structure. The LightsHope spell_template table matches almost exactly the layout and field names of early WoW client database tables.”

This takedown notice had some effect, as people now see a “repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown” message when they access it in their browser.

While this may slow down development temporarily, it appears that the server itself is still running just fine. There were some downtime reports earlier this week, but it’s unknown whether that was related.

In addition to the GitHub repository, the official Twitter account was also suspended recently.

TorrentFreak contacted both Blizzard and Light’s Hope earlier this week for a comment on the situation. At the time of publication, we haven’t heard back.

Blizzard’s takedown notice comes just weeks after several organizations and gaming fans asked the US Copyright Office to make a DMCA circumvention exemption for “abandoned” games, including older versions of popular MMORPGs.

While it’s possible that such an exemption is granted in the future, it’s unlikely to apply to the public at large. The more likely scenario is that it would permit libraries, researchers, and museums to operate servers for these abandoned games.

My career is a different story. Over the past two decades and a change, I went from writing CGI scripts and setting up WAN routers for a chain of shopping malls, to doing pentests for institutional customers, to designing a series of network monitoring platforms and handling incident response for a big telco, to building and running the product security org for one of the largest companies in the world. It’s been an interesting ride – and now that I’m on the hook for the well-being of about 100 folks across more than a dozen subteams around the world, I’ve been thinking a bit about the lessons learned along the way.

Of course, I’m a bit hesitant to write such a post: sometimes, your efforts pan out not because of your approach, but despite it – and it’s possible to draw precisely the wrong conclusions from such anecdotes. Still, I’m very proud of the culture we’ve created and the caliber of folks working on our team. It happened through the work of quite a few talented tech leads and managers even before my time, but it did not happen by accident – so I figured that my observations may be useful for some, as long as they are taken with a grain of salt.

But first, let me start on a somewhat somber note: what nobody tells you is that one’s level on the leadership ladder tends to be inversely correlated with several measures of happiness. The reason is fairly simple: as you get more senior, a growing number of people will come to you expecting you to solve increasingly fuzzy and challenging problems – and you will no longer be patted on the back for doing so. This should not scare you away from such opportunities, but it definitely calls for a particular mindset: your motivation must come from within. Look beyond the fight-of-the-day; find satisfaction in seeing how far your teams have come over the years.

With that out of the way, here’s a collection of notes, loosely organized into three major themes.

The curse of a techie leader

Perhaps the most interesting observation I have is that for a person coming from a technical background, building a healthy team is first and foremost about the subtle art of letting go.

There is a natural urge to stay involved in any project you’ve started or helped improve; after all, it’s your baby: you’re familiar with all the nuts and bolts, and nobody else can do this job as well as you. But as your sphere of influence grows, this becomes a choke point: there are only so many things you could be doing at once. Just as importantly, the project-hoarding behavior robs more junior folks of the ability to take on new responsibilities and bring their own ideas to life. In other words, when done properly, delegation is not just about freeing up your plate; it’s also about empowerment and about signalling trust.

Of course, when you hand your project over to somebody else, the new owner will initially be slower and more clumsy than you; but if you pick the new leads wisely, give them the right tools and the right incentives, and don’t make them deathly afraid of messing up, they will soon excel at their new jobs – and be grateful for the opportunity.

A related affliction of many accomplished techies is the conviction that they know the answers to every question even tangentially related to their domain of expertise; that belief is coupled with a burning desire to have the last word in every debate. When practiced in moderation, this behavior is fine among peers – but for a leader, one of the most important skills to learn is knowing when to keep your mouth shut: people learn a lot better by experimenting and making small mistakes than by being schooled by their boss, and they often try to read into your passing remarks. Don’t run an authoritarian camp focused on total risk aversion or perfectly efficient resource management; just set reasonable boundaries and exit conditions for experiments so that they don’t spiral out of control – and be amazed by the results every now and then.

Death by planning

When nothing is on fire, it’s easy to get preoccupied with maintaining the status quo. If your current headcount or budget request lists all the same projects as last year’s, or if you ever find yourself ending an argument by deferring to a policy or a process document, it’s probably a sign that you’re getting complacent. In security, complacency usually ends in tears – and when it doesn’t, it leads to burnout or boredom.

In my experience, your goal should be to develop a cadre of managers or tech leads capable of coming up with clever ideas, prioritizing them among themselves, and seeing them to completion without your day-to-day involvement. In your spare time, make it your mission to challenge them to stay ahead of the curve. Ask your vendor security lead how they’d streamline their work if they had a 40% jump in the number of vendors but no extra headcount; ask your product security folks what’s the second line of defense or containment should your primary defenses fail. Help them get good ideas off the ground; set some mental success and failure criteria to be able to cut your losses if something does not pan out.

Of course, malfunctions happen even in the best-run teams; to spot trouble early on, instead of overzealous project tracking, I found it useful to encourage folks to run a data-driven org. I’d usually ask them to imagine that a brand new VP shows up in our office and, as his first order of business, asks “why do you have so many people here and how do I know they are doing the right things?”. Not everything in security can be quantified, but hard data can validate many of your assumptions – and will alert you to unseen issues early on.

When focusing on data, it’s important not to treat pie charts and spreadsheets as an art unto itself; if you run a security review process for your company, your CSAT scores are going to reach 100% if you just rubberstamp every launch request within ten minutes of receiving it. Make sure you’re asking the right questions; instead of “how satisfied are you with our process”, try “is your product better as a consequence of talking to us?”

Whenever things are not progressing as expected, it is a natural instinct to fall back to micromanagement, but it seldom truly cures the ill. It’s probable that your team disagrees with your vision or its feasibility – and that you’re either not listening to their feedback, or they don’t think you’d care. It’s good to assume that most of your employees are as smart or smarter than you; barking your orders at them more loudly or more frequently does not lead anyplace good. It’s good to listen to them and either present new facts or work with them on a plan you can all get behind.

In some circumstances, all that’s needed is honesty about the business trade-offs, so that your team feels like your “partner in crime”, not a victim of circumstance. For example, we’d tell our folks that by not falling behind on basic, unglamorous work, we earn the trust of our VPs and SVPs – and that this translates into the independence and the resources we need to pursue more ambitious ideas without being told what to do; it’s how we game the system, so to speak. Oh: leading by example is a pretty powerful tool at your disposal, too.

The human factor

I’ve come to appreciate that hiring decent folks who can get along with others is far more important than trying to recruit conference-circuit superstars. In fact, hiring superstars is a decidedly hit-and-miss affair: while certainly not a rule, there is a proportion of folks who put the maintenance of their celebrity status ahead of job responsibilities or the well-being of their peers.

For teams, one of the most powerful demotivators is a sense of unfairness and disempowerment. This is where tech-originating leaders can shine, because their teams usually feel that their bosses understand and can evaluate the merits of the work. But it also means you need to be decisive and actually solve problems for them, rather than just letting them vent. You will need to make unpopular decisions every now and then; in such cases, I think it’s important to move quickly, rather than prolonging the uncertainty – but it’s also important to sincerely listen to concerns, explain your reasoning, and be frank about the risks and trade-offs.

Whenever you see a clash of personalities on your team, you probably need to respond swiftly and decisively; being right should not justify being a bully. If you don’t react to repeated scuffles, your best people will probably start looking for other opportunities: it’s draining to put up with constant pie fights, no matter if the pies are thrown straight at you or if you just need to duck one every now and then.

More broadly, personality differences seem to be a much better predictor of conflict than any technical aspects underpinning a debate. As a boss, you need to identify such differences early on and come up with creative solutions. Sometimes, all you need is taking some badly-delivered but valid feedback and having a conversation with the other person, asking some questions that can help them reach the same conclusions without feeling that their worldview is under attack. Other times, the only path forward is making sure that some folks simply don’t run into each for a while.

Finally, dealing with low performers is a notoriously hard but important part of the game. Especially within large companies, there is always the temptation to just let it slide: sideline a struggling person and wait for them to either get over their issues or leave. But this sends an awful message to the rest of the team; for better or worse, fairness is important to most. Simply firing the low performers is seldom the best solution, though; successful recovery cases are what sets great managers apart from the average ones.

Oh, one more thought: people in leadership roles have their allegiance divided between the company and the people who depend on them. The obligation to the company is more formal, but the impact you have on your team is longer-lasting and more intimate. When the obligations to the employer and to your team collide in some way, make sure you can make the right call; it might be one of the the most consequential decisions you’ll ever make.

Longtime embedded Linux development company Free Electrons has just changed its name to Bootlin due to a trademark dispute (with “FREE SAS, a French telecom operator, known as the owner of the free.fr website“). It is possible that Free Electrons may lose access to its “free-electrons.com” domain name as part of the dispute, so links to the many resources that Free Electrons hosts (including documentation and conference videos) should be updated to use “bootlin.com”. “The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS.

However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court.

This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle.”

While there’s no shortage of people who advocate free sharing of movies and music, passions are often raised when it comes to the availability of educational information.

Significant numbers of people believe that learning should be open to all and that texts and associated materials shouldn’t be locked away by copyright holders trying to monetize knowledge. Of course, people who make a living creating learning materials see the position rather differently.

A clash of these ideals is brewing in the United States where online learning platform Udemy has been trying to have some of its courses taken down from FreeTutorials.us, a site that makes available premium tutorials and other learning materials for free.

“Pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (‘DMCA’), this communication serves as a notice of infringement and request for removal of certain web content available on freetutorials.us,” the letter reads.

“I hereby request that you remove or disable access to the material listed in Exhibit A in as expedient a fashion as possible. This communication does not constitute a waiver of any right to recover damages incurred by virtue of any such unauthorized activities, and such rights as well as claims for other relief are expressly retained.”

A small sample of Exhibit A

On January 10, 2018, the same law firm wrote to Cloudflare, which provides services to FreeTutorials. The DMCA notice asked Cloudflare to disable access to the same set of infringing content listed above.

It seems likely that whatever happened next wasn’t to Udemy’s satisfaction. On January 16, an attorney from the same law firm filed a DMCA subpoena at a district court in California. A DMCA subpoena can enable a copyright holder to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer without having to file a lawsuit and without needing a signature from a judge.

The subpoena was directed at Cloudflare, which provides services to FreeTutorials. The company was ordered to hand over “all identifying information identifying the owner, operator and/or contact person(s) associated with the domain www.freetutorials.us, including but not limited to name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), email address(es), Internet protocol connection records, administrative records and billing records from the time the account was established to the present.”

On January 26, the date by which Cloudflare was ordered to hand over the information, Cloudflare wrote to FreeTutorials with a somewhat late-in-the-day notification.

“We received the attached subpoena regarding freetutorials.us, a domain managed through your Cloudflare account. The subpoena requires us to provide information in our systems related to this website,” the company wrote.

“We have determined that this is a valid subpoena, and we are required to provide the requested information. In accordance with our Privacy Policy, we are informing you before we provide any of the requested subscriber information. We plan to turn over documents in response to the subpoena on January 26th, 2018, unless you intervene in the case.”

With that deadline passing last Friday, it’s safe to say that Cloudflare has complied with the subpoena as the law requires. However, TorrentFreak spoke with FreeTutorials who told us that the company doesn’t hold anything useful on them.

“No, they have nothing,” the team explained.

Noting that they’ll soon dispense with the services of Cloudflare, the team confirmed that they had received emails from Udemy and its instructors but hadn’t done a lot in response.

“How about a ‘NO’? was our answer to all the DMCA takedown requests from Udemy and its Instructors,” they added.

FreeTutorials (FTU) are affiliated with FreeCoursesOnline (FCO) and seem passionate about what they do. In common with others who distribute learning materials online, they express a belief in free education for all, irrespective of financial resources.

“We, FTU and FCO, are a group of seven members assorted as a team from different countries and cities. We are JN, SRZ aka SunRiseZone, Letap, Lihua Google Drive, Kaya, Zinnia, Faiz MeemBazooka,” a spokesperson revealed.

“We’re all members and colleagues and we also have our own daily work and business stuff to do. We have been through that phase of life when we didn’t have enough money to buy books and get tuition or even apply for a good course that we always wanted to have, so FTU & FCO are just our vision to provide Free Education For Everyone.

“We would love to change our priorities towards our current and future projects, only if we manage to get some faithful FTU’ers to join in and help us to grow together and make FTU a place it should be.”

TorrentFreak requested comment from Udemy but at the time of publication, we were yet to hear back. However, we did manage to get in touch with Jonathan Levi, an Udemy instructor who sent this takedown notice to the site in October 2017:

“I’m writing to you on behalf of SuperHuman Enterprises, LLC. You are in violation of our copyright, using our images, and linking to pirated copies of our courses. Remove them IMMEDIATELY or face severe legal action….You have 48 hours to comply,” he wrote, adding:

“And in case you’re going to say I don’t have evidence that I own the files, it’s my fucking face in the videos.”

Levi says that the site had been non-responsive so now things are being taken to the next level.

“They don’t reply to takedowns, so we’ve joined a class action lawsuit against FTU lead by Udemy and a law firm specializing in this type of thing,” Levi concludes.

Hey folks, Rob from The MagPi here! Issue 66 of The MagPi is out right now, with the ultimate guide to powering your home media with Raspberry Pi. We think the Pi is the perfect replacement or upgrade for many media devices, so in this issue we show you how to build a range of Raspberry Pi media projects.

Yes, it does say Pac-Man robotics on the cover. They’re very cool.

The article covers file servers for sharing media across your network, music streaming boxes that connect to Spotify, a home theatre PC to make your TV-watching more relaxing, a futuristic Pi-powered moving photoframe, and even an Alexa voice assistant to control all these devices!

More to see

That’s not all though — The MagPi 66 also shows you how to build a Raspberry Pi cluster computer, how to control LEGO robots using the GPIO, and why your Raspberry Pi isn’t affected by Spectre and Meltdown.

Get The MagPi 66

Issue 66 is available today from WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda. If you live in the US, head over to your local Barnes & Noble or Micro Center in the next few days. You can also get the new issue online from our store, or digitally via our Android and iOS apps. And don’t forget, there’s always the free PDF as well.

Subscribe for free goodies

Want to support the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the magazine, and get some cool free stuff? If you take out a twelve-month print subscription to The MagPi, you’ll get a Pi Zero W, Pi Zero case, and adapter cables absolutely free! This offer does not currently have an end date.

Thank you to my colleague Harvey Bendana for this blog on how to do shallow cloning on AWS CodeBuild using GitHub Enterprise as a source.

Today we are announcing support for using GitHub Enterprise as a source type for CodeBuild. You can now initiate build tasks from changes in source code hosted on your own implementation of GitHub Enterprise.

We are also announcing support for shallow cloning of a repo when you use CodeCommit, BitBucket, GitHub, or GitHub Enterprise as a source type. Shallow cloning allows you to truncate history of a repo in order to save space and speed up cloning times.

In this post, I’ll walk you through how to configure GitHub Enterprise as a source type with a defined clone depth for an AWS CodeBuild project. I’ll also show you all the moving parts associated with a successful implementation.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service. There are no servers to provision and scale, or software to install, configure, and operate. You just specify the location of your source code, choose your build settings, and CodeBuild runs build scripts for compiling, testing, and packaging your code.

GitHub Enterprise is the on-premises version of GitHub.com. It makes collaborative coding possible and enjoyable for large-scale enterprise software development teams.

Many enterprises choose GitHub Enterprise as their preferred source code/version control repository because it can be hosted in their own trusted network, whether that is an on-premises data center or their own Amazon VPCs.

Requirements

You’ll need an AWS account.

You’ll need a GitHub Enterprise implementation with a repo. If you’d like to deploy one inside your own Amazon VPC, check out our Quick Start Guide.

Download your GitHub Enterprise SSL certificate:

Note: The following steps are required only for self-signed certificates. You can forego installation of a certificate if you are using self-signed certificates and default to HTTP communication with your repo. For this post, I am using a self-signed certificate and the Firefox browser. These steps may vary, depending on your browser of choice.

Navigate to your GitHub Enterprise environment and sign in with your credentials.

7. Enter the repository URL and choose a Git clone depth value that makes sense for you. Allowed values are 1, 5, 25, or Full. For this post, I am using a depth of 1.

8. Select the Webhook check box.

9. Continue with the rest of the configuration for your project, choosing options that best suit your build needs. For this post, I am using an AWS CodeBuild managed image running the Ubuntu OS with the base runtime configuration. Enter your build specifications or build commands. I am using a simple build command of git log . so that it can be easily found in the CloudWatch logs of the CodeBuild project. It will also be used to demonstrate the shallow clone feature.

10. Next, select Install certificate from your S3 to install your GitHub Enterprise self-signed certificate from S3. For Bucket of certificate, I’ve entered the S3 bucket where I uploaded the certificate. For Object key of certificate, I’ve entered the name of the certificate.

11. Lastly, configure artifacts, caching, IAM roles, and VPC configurations. For this post, I chose not to generate any artifacts from this build. From the following screenshot, you’ll see I’ve opted out of cache, requested a new IAM role with the required permissions, and have not defined VPC access. Choose Continue to validate and complete the creation of the CodeBuild project.

Note: If your GitHub Enterprise environment is in an Amazon VPC, configure VPC access for your project. Define the VPC ID, subnet ID, and security group so that your project has access to the EC2 instances hosting your GitHub Enterprise environment.

12. After the project is created, a dialog box displays a CodeBuild payload URL and secret. They are used to create a webhook for the repo in the GitHub Enterprise environment.

Create a webhook in your GitHub Enterprise repo:

2. Paste the payload URL and secret into their respective fields. Under Which events would you like to trigger this webhook? choose an option. For this post, I am using Let me select individual events. I then chose Pull request and Push as the two event triggers.

1. Clone the repo to the local file system. For information, see Clone the Repository Using the Command Line on the GitHub Help website. Now create a feature branch, push a change, and generate a pull request for review, and, ultimately, merge to master. Here is the state of the GitHub Enterprise repo and AWS CodeBuild project before pushing a change:

4. After the changes have been saved, push them to the feature branch.

5. There is now notification of a new branch in the GitHub Enterprise environment.

6. Generate a pull request from the feature branch in preparation of review and merge to master.

7. The reviewer(s) will then review and merge the pull request, pushing all changes to the master branch.

8. Here is the updated repo:

9. After the change has been pushed successfully, a new build is initiated.

10. In the following screenshot, you’ll see the initiator is Github-Hookshot/eb0c46 and the source version is 03169095b8f16ac077388471035becb2070aa12c.

11. In the Recent Deliveries section, under the configuration of the GitHub Enterprise repo webhook, the CodeBuild project initiator is defined as User-Agent. The source version is denoted in the Payload output. They match!

12. A successfully completed build should appear under the CodeBuild project.

13. The entire log output of the CodeBuild project can be viewed in CloudWatch logs. In the following screenshot, the source was downloaded successfully from the GitHub Enterprise repo and the build command of git log . was run successfully. Only the most recent commit appears in the git history output. This is because I defined a clone depth of 1.

14. If I query the git history of the repo on the local repository, the output has the full commit history. This is expected because I am doing a full clone locally.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I showed you how to configure GitHub Enterprise as a source type for your AWS CodeBuild project with a clone depth of 1. These new features expand the capabilities of AWS CodeBuild and the suite of AWS Developer Tools for CI/CD and DevOps processes.

I hope you found this post useful. Feel free to leave your feedback or suggestions in the comments.

games: I launchedStrawberry Jam 2, a month-long February game jam about making horny games. I will probably be making a horny game for it.

idchoppers: I took another crack at dilation. Some meager progress, maybe. I think I’m now porting bad academic C++ to Rust to get the algorithm I want, and I can’t help but wonder if I could just make up something of my own faster than this.

fox flux: I did a bunch of brainstorming and consolidated a bunch of notes from like four different places, which feels like work but also feels like it doesn’t actually move the project forward.

anise!!: Ah, yes, this fell a bit by the wayside. Some map work, some attempts at a 3D effect for a particular thing without much luck (though I found a workaround in the last couple days).

computers: I relieved myself of some 200 browser tabs, which feels fantastic, though I’ve since opened like 80 more. Alas. I also tried to put together a firejail profile for running mystery games from the internet, and I got like 90% of the way there, but it turns out there’s basically no way to stop an X application from reading all keyboard input.

(Yes, I know about that, and I tried it. Yes, that too.)

I’ve got a small pile of little projects that are vaguely urgent, so as much as I’d love to bash my head against idchoppers for a solid week, I’m gonna try to focus on getting a couple half-done things full-done. And maybe try to find time for art regularly so I don’t fall out of practice? Huff puff.

With Raspberry Pi projects using home assistant services such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home becoming more and more popular, we invited Raspberry Pi maker Matt ‘Raspberry Pi Spy‘ Hawkins to write a guest post about his latest project, the Pi Spy Alexa Skill.

Pi Spy Skill

The Alexa system uses Skills to provide voice-activated functionality, and it allows you to create new Skills to add extra features. With the Pi Spy Skill, you can ask Alexa what function each pin on the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO header provides, for example by using the phrase “Alexa, ask Pi Spy what is Pin 2.” In response to a phrase such as “Alexa, ask Pi Spy where is GPIO 8”, Alexa can now also tell you on which pin you can find a specific GPIO reference number.

This information is already available in various forms, but I thought it would be useful to retrieve it when I was busy soldering or building circuits and had no hands free.

Creating an Alexa Skill

There is a learning curve to creating a new Skill, and in some regards it was similar to mobile app development.

A Skill consists of two parts: the first is created within the Amazon Developer Console and defines the structure of the voice commands Alexa should recognise. The second part is a webservice that can receive data extracted from the voice commands and provide a response back to the device. You can create the webservice on a webserver, internet-connected device, or cloud service.

I decided to use Amazon’s AWS Lambda service. Once set up, this allows you to write code without having to worry about the server it is running on. It also supports Python, so it fit in nicely with most of my other projects.

To get started, I logged into the Amazon Developer Console with my personal Amazon account and navigated to the Alexa section. I created a new Skill named Pi Spy. Within a Skill, you define an Intent Schema and some Sample Utterances. The schema defines individual intents, and the utterances define how these are invoked by the user.

Here is how my ExaminePin intent is defined in the schema:

Example utterances then attempt to capture the different phrases the user might speak to their device.

Whenever Alexa matches a spoken phrase to an utterance, it passes the name of the intent and the variable PinID to the webservice.

In the test section, you can check what JSON data will be generated and passed to your webservice in response to specific phrases. This allows you to verify that the webservices’ responses are correct.

Over on the AWS Services site, I created a Lambda function based on one of the provided examples to receive the incoming requests. Here is the section of that code which deals with the ExaminePin intent:

For this intent, I used a Python dictionary to match the incoming pin number to its description. Another Python function deals with the GPIO queries. A URL to this Lambda function was added to the Skill as its ‘endpoint’.

As with the Skill, the Python code can be tested to iron out any syntax errors or logic problems.

With suitable configuration, it would be possible to create the webservice on a Pi, and that is something I’m currently working on. This approach is particularly interesting, as the Pi can then be used to control local hardware devices such as cameras, lights, or pet feeders.

Note

My Alexa Skill is currently only available to UK users. I’m hoping Amazon will choose to copy it to the US service, but I think that is down to its perceived popularity, or it may be done in bulk based on release date. In the next update, I’ll be adding an American English version to help speed up this process.

Tags

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.